Long Term Retention Pains

[stfconsulting]

Hey guys, we are about 8 months into our Veeam deployment. In our datacenter we have about 100 VMs that we backup and replicate. Our biggest pains are around storage space and long term retention. We are coming from Storage Craft which was very lean with space requirements so still struggling a bit. Wondering if anyone can give us some feedback.

We need to retain 31 days of individual restore daily points and 6 months of monthly restore points. We have some archive jobs that could produce a 4tb monthly. This process is extremely time consuming / eats up a ton of space / puts additional pressure on dedup processes. Anyone see a huge problem with just switching to 180 days of daily incremental and ditching the monthly? I realize that this causes the restore to depend on a lot more files however we really need to cut down on the pain associated with the monthly generation for the larger archive jobs. Open to any suggestions / ideas.

[foggy]

If you need just a monthly state (not every day of the month), you can schedule an incremental job to run monthly - each monthly restore point will be an increment containing changes only (however, depending on how active VM is and the pattern of changes inside it, that increment could have considerable size as well).

[stfconsulting]

So you are suggestion a change in the active backup job? (not the backup copy job). We only use duplication (Windows 2012R2) on the backup copy jobs for performance reasons. (this could make it tough to leverage the primary job for long term retention). Probably going to have to work with our Veeam rep to get hooked up with someone that can help us with some of the job architecture because of all the little details and potential outcomes.

[Vitaliy S.]

Since you need to keep daily restore points, then changing job schedule for the primary job is not need. You can either setup an additional job or keep using backup copy job for that.

We need to retain 31 days of individual restore daily points and 6 months of monthly restore points.

Does it need to be full backups every month? What king of issues do you have with backup copy job and GFS retention policy? What are your current settings for this job?

[stfconsulting]

We do not need full backups every month. That is what is killing us right now. Too much overhead associated with building them. If there is a way we can design this where the monthly retention points are less painful to create I am all for it. Just hard to change anything when you have 100 servers / lots of jobs without blowing something up.

[alanbolte]

I think I understand - you have a single backup copy job set with daily copy, 31 days simple retention, and 6 monthly fulls. What you could do is change the backup copy (or create a second job) to have a 30 day copy interval, 6 restore points, and no fulls. I'm not sure how much space that would save you or if you might run into other problems e.g. time to merge the larger increments, but it's one configuration option.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you don't need full backups (GFS retention policy), then you can configure simple retention policy (6 restore points) for the backup copy job and use copy every 30 days interval.